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Abstract This special issue is the outcome of a workshop held at Purdue University in April 2022. It comprises thematic syntheses of five overarching dimensions of the Global-to-Local-to-Global (GLG) challenge to ensuring the long-term sustainability of land and water resources. These thematic dimensions include: climate change, ecosystems and biodiversity, governance, water resources and cyberinfrastructure. In addition, there are eight applications of GLG analysis to specific land and water sustainability challenges, ranging from environmental stress in the Amazon River Basin to groundwater depletion in the United States. Based on these papers, we conclude that, without fine-scale, local analysis, interventions focusing on land and water sustainability will likely be misguided. But formulating such policies without the broader, national/global context is also problematic – both from the point of view of the global drivers of local sustainability stresses, as well as to capture unanticipated spillovers. In addition, because local and global systems are connected to – and mediated by – meso-scale processes, accounting for key meso-scale phenomena, such as labor market functioning, is critical for characterizing GLG interactions. We also conclude that there is great scope for increasing the complexity of GLG analysis in future work. However, this carries significant risks. Increased complexity can outstrip data and modeling capabilities, slow down research, make results more difficult to understand and interpret, and complicate effective communication with decision-makers and other users of the analyses. We believe that research guidance regarding appropriate complexity is a high priority in the emerging field of Global-Local-Global analysis of sustainability.
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Global-to-local-to-global interactions and climate change
Abstract Climate change by its very nature epitomizes the necessity and usefulness of the global-to-local-to-global (GLG) paradigm. It is a global problem with the potential to affect local communities and ecosystems. Accumulation of local impacts and responses to climate change feeds back to regional and global systems creating feedback loops. Understanding these complex impacts and interactions is key to developing more resilient adaptation measures and designing more efficient mitigation policies. To this date, however, GLG interactions have not yet been an integrative part of the decision-support toolkit. The typical approach either traces the impacts of global action on the local level or estimates the implications of local policies at the global scale. The first approach misses cumulative feedback of local responses that can have regional, national or global impacts. In the second case, one undermines a global context of the local actions most likely misrepresenting the complexity of the local decision-making process. Potential interactions across scales are further complicated by the presence of cascading impacts, connected risks and tipping points. Capturing these dimensions is not always a straightforward task and often requires a departure from conventional modeling approaches. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art approaches to modeling GLG interactions in the context of climate change. We further identify key limitations that drive the lack of GLG coupling cases and discuss what could be done to address these challenges.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1855937
- PAR ID:
- 10526814
- Publisher / Repository:
- IOP Publishing
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Environmental Research Letters
- Volume:
- 18
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 1748-9326
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 053002
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/acc95c
